by Lydia Syson
So close. What could that mean for Anatole? The drumming thumped through Zéphyrine’s head. She couldn’t think. But she knew her duty was to her neighbourhood.
‘And here?’
‘Hard to tell. Something’s happening in the cemetery.’
‘Fighting?’ Hand-to-hand, above her grandparents’ grave?
‘Yes. Barricades, everyone is saying. That’s the first thing. We need more barricades. We’ve got to get building again, right away! But there doesn’t seem any strategy. No more gold braid, they keep saying inside. No more golden words, I say.’
‘The generals can’t abandon us!’
No answer.
‘Let’s go to the boulevard de Clichy, and see if we can help there.’ Rose began to push her way through the milling men.
‘I’m coming,’ said Zéphyrine, her voice rising.
Paris woke to find a third of the city already taken. The troops had swarmed in during the warm night, thousands pouring through the gates of Passy and Auteuil, Saint-Cloud and Sèvres. Doorway to doorway, they had crept through the streets. The outer suburbs fell first, quickly and easily, and there was no struggle either in the wealthy western neighbourhoods that were next on the soldiers’ route. A straggle of Commune volunteers fled east, defeated. By two in the morning, Versailles forces had already seized the grassy heights of Trocadéro while another government column pushed on down the vast avenue des Champs-Élysées. By morning, sympathetic residents were getting blue, white and red armbands out of hiding, arming themselves with the tricolour of the invaders.
All along the Grands Boulevards, well-dressed crowds came out to cheer on the red-breeched troops. They clapped their hands, as if they were at the opera, and called ‘Bravo!’, as if a battle had been won. Above the marching soldiers, coins showered down from the windows and jingled on the pavements. In this part of Paris, the stones had stayed firmly in place. The people here sat tight, mostly, waiting to be saved, playing cards to pass the time. As soon as they knew they were safe, out they rushed, wine bottles waving. Gentlemen stood smiling while their wives’ arms opened, smothering sweaty necks with silk and satin, sowing kisses under kepis.
‘How many fédérés have you killed?’ they asked.
A young soldier posed with a rifle he had yet to fire, and pretended to pick off a Communard sniper from an attic window. He bowed to laughter and applause. Salvation was sweet, so painlessly delivered.
Jules did his best to block the way.
‘You can’t stop me,’ Anatole said through his teeth. He tried to wrench his friend’s wrist from the doorframe, pushing and pulling shoulder against shoulder. They wrestled cheek to cheek, and Jules’s breath was in his face, hot and sweet and familiar. ‘You can’t honestly expect me to stay here and cower.’
‘Why not? Why not, for God’s sake? It’s all over now. Look how quickly the government troops reached Trocadéro.’ Unlike Anatole, Jules had stayed awake for the rest of the night, watching from the studio, trying to decide what to do. ‘They’ll be here in a matter of hours. So surrender now. Better not to be captured in arms.’
‘Better for who?’ Anatole finally broke through the human barricade, a scar of broken stitches on his chest from a ripped-off pocket. He turned round. Jules stood in the doorway, hands hanging uselessly by his side. ‘What do you know? This isn’t your fight. You’ve never understood it.’
Jules didn’t deny it. ‘At least don’t wear your uniform,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘Please. It’s madness. They’ll pick you out like this.’ He tried to snap his fingers, to show how fast, but they slid past each other without a sound. ‘You won’t even make it to the barracks, not from here.’
Jules had a point. Paris was a strange battlefield, and there had been no love for the Commune in this bourgeois neighbourhood at the best of times. It seemed all wrong to Anatole, after all this, to set off to fight without his uniform. But if Jules would worry less … Anatole shook his head, and hurried back to his room to change. When he set out again, Jules was still standing on the landing. Anatole kissed him goodbye, once on each cheek. They hesitated for a moment, forehead to hot, bowed forehead, and then Anatole hammered down the stairs.
Marie scalded her tongue and dropped her cup when she heard the news. The spilled coffee left an ugly spattering of brown on the bodice of her dress, and puddled on the counter. Annalise, on the morning shift behind the bar and none too sure how long that shift would now last, was quick to help.
‘Here, use this.’ A damp cloth, with a sour milk smell. The barmaid folded her arms, and glanced at the café owner resentfully. ‘I think we should shut up now. It’s going to turn nasty. And I’m not staying here if it does.’
‘I heard that, young lady. And don’t you roll your eyes at me. We’ll shut up when I say so. There are workers still to be fed and watered. You can’t guard a city on an empty stomach.’
As he spoke, a crowd of fédérés swarmed in, calling for brandy.
‘We are betrayed,’ they said. ‘Betrayed again. Let’s drink to the Commune while we can. The Commune or Death!’
Marie pushed her way out, eyes staring straight ahead. If Versailles could only have waited one more day. Just one more day. That was her first thought. When all the other thoughts came crowding into her mind, pushing and shoving each other out of the way, she wished it could be her only one.
No wonder these neighbourhoods were falling so quickly. Anatole passed a few hastily assembled barricades, already quite abandoned. When he reached the headquarters of his old battalion, he found the door bolted, just as Jules had predicted.
He had run all the way, and sweat began to stream from his face as soon as he stopped, salt stinging his eyes. He leaned against the wall, sliding down to a despairing crouch, hands in his sticky hair. Anatole waited for his pulse to stop galloping, then looked up and down the street, to check that it was definitely as deserted as it seemed. Picking himself up, he brushed off his trousers, tidied himself up. In his rush, he’d missed a collar stud: the back of his neck gaped. He found a spare stud in his pocket, and quickly fastened it. He should have thanked Jules properly for his advice. It was the right decision. Anatole was glad to be in civilian clothes, and unremarkable.
No sound of footsteps. Every shopfront was shuttered, and most of the windows above them too, nobody prepared to stir until they knew what was happening. Perhaps a mile away now, the rattle of gunfire and thunder of shells continued, but the stillness of this street was overpowering.
Zéphyrine had always thought her fingers pretty tough, but it wasn’t long before her hands were blistered and bleeding, and Rose’s too.
Just after nine, the first cannon on the hillside behind them began finally to fire half-heartedly. Of course they were quickly answered, perhaps from Trocadéro. One shell landed somewhere on the hillside immediately above them, and Zéphyrine braced herself against the wall as the whole street shuddered. Then she went back to her heaving: she was trying to unroot a reluctant fan of iron that had once protected a lime tree. The tree itself had been burned for fuel in the siege. At last the metal came out of the earth, and, bit by bit, with the help of Madame Mouton and her daughter, Zéphyrine dragged it towards the rising pile in the middle of the street. The barricade was still so low at either end that a child playing could have jumped it at a gallop. But it was rising steadily, and there were no children playing here. Everyone was helping, and the strongest had managed to haul a small cannon into the middle of the barricade, wedging it in with a good solid bedstead on one side and a ladder on the other. The praying hands of a stone madonna poked through its rungs.
A muffled cheer went up as a mattress came tumbling down from an upstairs window a little way up the street. A group of women were going from house to house to beg for more.
‘The wine merchants!’ cried Rose. ‘They’ll give up their casks for us, won’t they?’
‘They must. Tell them it’s by order of the Commune!’ said Zéphyrine.
&nb
sp; The shopkeepers didn’t need orders, and their customers were happy enough to keep emptying more. Before long, wooden barrels came rolling hollowly down the hill like eggs on Easter Sunday. Women and children crouched at the bottom, ready to intercept the careering, clattering creatures and pack them with stones and cobbles and earth. Earth! Earth! That was the thing, everyone agreed. Beware of ricochet, said the white-haired veterans of ’48. Heap the earth up in front too, absorb every bullet.
Towards noon, a messenger on horseback came clattering by, briefly interrupting the fiery sparks of mattock, spade and pickaxe. He brought leaflets from the leadership, printed already. ‘Let Paris bristle with barricades,’ they shouted. Rose and Zéphyrine looked at their barricade. It was a foot or two higher, but you couldn’t say it bristled. They redoubled their efforts.
Marie retreated to her room, feeling cold and sick. It was over. Everything was over. She might never have another chance to sing on the stage of the Opéra, and she was trapped, in every way. Just as she had anticipated, she would be forever tainted by her association with the Commune – having her name in tonight’s programme would see to that, no matter that the performance would never take place. The situation felt too enormous to comprehend. Marie had no idea what might happen next or what she could hope for. Survival, she supposed. She was good at that. As for the others, she only hoped that Jules had been able to make Anatole and Zéphyrine see sense that morning, that they had all been together when the news broke. Something seemed to have shifted a little the night before. It wasn’t impossible. Surely Jules would have managed to talk them both out of rushing off to the barricades? Anyone could see that the time for heroics was over. Surrender was the Commune’s best hope with the army inside the city walls. If ever there was a time to lie low, this was it.
Then a note arrived that turned Marie white. She ran out into the street after its ragged messenger.
‘Wait!’ she shouted. ‘Who gave you this? How did he look? What did he say? Come back!’
But the child did not stop or answer. He had done what he’d been paid for, and there was plenty more money to be earned on a day like this if you were sharp about it.
Almost unable to believe the handwriting on this scrap of paper, Marie went through every word again, and then again.
‘I am in Paris,’ it read. ‘My unit is stationed at the Luxembourg Garden. As soon as I can, I will come to you. Meanwhile, courage! Emile.’
She looked at the date. Today was Emile’s name day. It was a sign, wasn’t it? She wanted to believe in destiny. It must mean that they would see each other soon. All she had to do was sit it out and be patient for a little longer. At the end of her street she could see a new barricade rising. On the walls were new posters, wet and glistening with fresh paste, a message from the Commune for the soldiers of Versailles urging them to break ranks now, for the last time.
‘Brothers!’ it said. ‘The hour of the battle of the people against their oppressors has arrived. Do not abandon the workers’ cause! Do as your brothers did on March the eighteenth! Unite with the people who are your people. Long live the Republic! Long live the Commune!’
Marie shook her head. Emile was a professional soldier through and through. He would never be persuaded to desert. It was a lost cause.
Down in the cellar, barely able to breathe, Jules could not know what was happening above his head. The darkness made the colours of his imaginings more lurid, and his knotted guts felt as heavy as iron. He tortured himself with elaborate precision. He pictured Anatole lying in a gutter, a bullet wound, a pool of blood collecting round his skull. He wondered if there was anything else he could have said to stop him leaving, and why, at the very last, he had left so much unsaid. In the deep shadows by the coal mound, a couple of maids invisibly wept.
Deciding he would prefer to know the worst, Jules eventually dragged himself back upstairs. He emerged into a silent, deserted building, bricks and mortar holding their breath while the sounds of battle crashed and whined outside. As he opened the main door, confused by the latch – the concierge usually appeared from the shadows, just when she was needed, key in hand, pipe in mouth – Jules had no idea who held this street.
The pavement was still intact at least, he noted. Jules crossed the road to try to get a better sense of things and a cascade of broken glass instantly tumbled from somewhere high above, shattering into smaller pieces at his feet. An unidentifiable rifle muzzle emerged from the window of the corner house, and the crack of firing began.
‘Get back inside, you fool!’ The scream came from a storey down. A fédéré at different window was half-hidden in thick puffs of drifting smoke. ‘They’ll be here any minute. You’re right in the middle of it.’
Jules froze on the pavement. His eardrums were fluttering from the screaming of the machine guns – they sounded so unimaginably close – and he could barely make out the man’s words.
‘Get back inside, I said!’
Then a hand reached out from the building behind him and snatched him backwards and inside. He lost his balance and landed in an ungainly heap on the floor. The porter who had pulled him in stood staring down at him, ready to throw him out again if necessary.
‘Thank you,’ said Jules, sitting up and rubbing the back of his neck. The porter’s wife nudged her husband, and he offered Jules a hand up.
‘Come in here,’ she said, leading the way through a door at the back of the porter’s office and into a simple sitting room. Jules’s heart began to beat faster again. ‘Whose side are you on?’ he asked.
‘Nobody’s,’ replied the man quickly, glancing at his wife, who nodded.
‘We just want peace, and our children safe,’ she agreed, elbowing her husband in the ribs. ‘But I recognised you,’ she said. ‘You’re the American photographer, aren’t you? You live opposite? I’ve seen you, with your camera and all that stuff, your cart, always coming and going.’
Jules didn’t think he’d ever seen either of them before, but he supposed they must always have been here. He nodded, and then a cry came from right under his feet, making him jump.
‘Mama! Mama! What’s happening? Who’s there?’
The woman stamped on the floorboards and bellowed out: ‘Nothing. It’s all right. Nothing to worry about. Now keep quiet like I told you, and for pity’s sake don’t come out unless we say …’
Husband and wife exchanged a worried glance.
‘They told us we’ve got to keep the shutters open upstairs.’ The man rolled his eyes up to the ceiling.
There was a loud rattle of gunfire outside. Hard to know where it came from.
‘Who told you?’
‘There are National Guardsmen taking shelter up there. We couldn’t stop them. We didn’t know if we should. We didn’t know what to do.’
Jules nodded. So this was street-fighting. He’d imagined swords flashing outside on cobbles, elaborate oaths, men leaping fantastically from balcony to balcony. Something like The Three Musketeers. Absurd really, in this day and age. Street-fighting wasn’t really street-fighting, he realised, but house-fighting. All over Paris men were on rooftops and window ledges, hollowing through walls and between cellars, moving unseen from house to house, bursting in on trembling families. Barricades were useless. All you had to do is get above them.
The building began to shake. Not with an explosion, but a series of blows. Every wall shivered. Jules and his new companions dropped to the floor, just as a tremendous crash sounded immediately above them.
‘My God,’ said the woman, clutching her husband, wiping her eyes, coughing. A blizzard of dust and plaster was still hurtling down. ‘They’ve broken through upstairs. The Versaillais are in this house.’
Firing followed instantly. Three shots, two muffled thuds, and another scattering of snowy dust on the listeners below. They gazed at each other like ghosts. Several pairs of boots pounded down the stairs and the door burst open. It banged against the wall so hard that in the hallway a glass-framed picture
smashed to the ground with a pathetic high-pitched tinkle.
Three soldiers came in with rifles raised, ready to fire. The men seemed huge in this little room, with their weapons and boots and savage energy. They towered over the tiny concierge and his wife, both backed against the far wall, chests rising and falling uncontrollably. Wild eyes stared through floating dust. Jules, to his shame, had dropped behind a faded armchair. He slowly rose to his feet, speaking in English first, and deliberately exaggerating his Americanisms, forcing each sentence to rise in an unspoken question. Then he repeated himself in French.
‘No need for that, gentlemen.’ He braced himself and stepped forward with a hand extended to shake the nearest soldier’s hand. All three muzzles instantly turned on him. He battled a flinch and held up both hands instead, half-placating, half-surrendering. ‘Calm down. Take it easy.’
Two pairs of eyes slid towards their officer’s, who shook his head slightly, but did not lower his gun.
‘He’s a foreigner. They’re the troublemakers, they say. The International. They mustn’t be spared.’
Panic geysered up inside him. He took a deep breath, and locked his stomach. ‘Do I look like a member of the International Workingmen’s Association, gentlemen?’
What did a member of the International look like? Everyone in the room was wondering the same thing. Jules remembered Marie’s confusion on the day the Commune was declared, and Anatole’s easy answer. Weight shifted.
‘The rubbish of every nation in Europe has come to destroy Paris,’ muttered one soldier, like an obedient parrot.
‘I’m not from Europe. I’m an American citizen. Take me to the embassy and check my credentials if you wish. But first I’d be obliged if you would put your weapons down.’
Nobody did.
‘They were harbouring Communards,’ said the soldier on the left. This one was sandy-haired. Well-scrubbed. Anxious to do the right thing, and follow every order to the letter. ‘That’s a crime.’